just another infosec blog

MAMP WTF: 3 versions of PHP – 2 versions available

I decided to migrate from XAMPP for Mac to MAMP today. The reason why? XAMPP for Mac has PHP 5.3.1 and I was in need of 5.3.1x and 5.4.x – which MAMP offers. XAMPP seems dead for my platform. Haven’t been an update for quite a long time. Switching over was somewhat easy – but not without hassle. One of my eZ Publish based sites had an issue with PHP 5.4.4. It could not connect to MySQL properly. It went flat out dead and I have a log to prove it. Better switch over to 5.3 through the MAMP Gui.

MAMP Gui is quite extraordinary. It listed PHP version 5.2 and 5.4 – but not 5.3 even though it was present in the application structure. Googling the issue revealed that I could just rename the unwanted version and the GUI would show the 5.3 version instead. Problem solved.

MAMP is available as free, or as an paid Pro version. Me not having a budget chose the free version. Obviously the Pro version manages to list all versions, though. WHY? I can under no circumstance see that the people behind MAMP would kick the bucket if the free version listed all available PHP versions. This isn’t a killer feature worth paying for since I expect it to already be there! Hell – I could’ve compiled everything from source and be happy as a lark. But the company policy doesn’t want me to have access to a decent compiler. In fact. Any compiler at all! So I have to rely on a prepackaged *AMP stack. I’m not angry or anything, really. Just baffled. And hurt. Butthurt.